Logistics

Today Flexport announced that it secured $100M in funding from SF Express, the leading courier company in China. The strategic partnership allows Flexport to expand its operations in China and around the world. SF Express joins existing investors including First Round Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Founders Fund, DST, and Y Combinator.

In just five years Flexport has distinguished itself as the leading software-powered freight forwarder, helping more than 15,000 companies deliver their goods to customers worldwide. In the past year Flexport shipped $3.8B worth of merchandise between 97 countries for companies including Warby Parker, Peloton, Ring, Bridgestone, and Georgia Pacific.

Flexport provides businesses with global logistics services including air freight, ocean freight, trucking, cargo insurance, and customs brokerage. The company plans to increase its investment in technology so it can continue to reduce transaction costs, improve the user experience, and empower supply chain managers to make more data-driven decisions.

“Our mission is to make global trade easy for everyone,” said Flexport’s CEO and founder Ryan Petersen. “The investment by SF Express, one of the world’s top couriers, will let us create more value for businesses shipping freight internationally.”

In 2017 Flexport tripled its revenue while opening new offices in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Shenzhen. This rapid growth played a role in investors’ enthusiasm for the company. In 2018 Flexport launched its private air freight service, a dedicated 747 that flies twice weekly from Hong Kong to Los Angeles carrying its customers’ cargo. This year the company is expected to double its warehousing footprint, while opening new offices in Hamburg, Chicago, Taiwan, and Shanghai.

“Flexport is one of those companies that will not merely satisfy its market but grow it,” said Flexport investor and founder of Y Combinator, Paul Graham. “There will be more international trade because of Flexport, and international trade is a very big thing for there to be more of.”

About Flexport
Flexport is a technology platform for global trade. Founded in 2013, the company provides businesses with global logistics services including air freight, ocean freight, trucking, cargo insurance, customs brokerage, and inventory financing. Flexport’s software unlocks efficiencies, improves user experiences, and enables more data-driven decision making for modern logistics teams. In 2017 more than 15,000 companies relied on Flexport to ship $3.8B worth of merchandise between 97 countries. By engineering new infrastructure for international shipping and commerce, Flexport is making global trade easy for everyone.

About SF Express
SF Holding (SZSE:002352) is a leading integrated logistics service provider and an intelligent logistics operator providing services in China and overseas based on its aviation network, ground network, and information network. Besides China, SF’s international network covers more than 53 countries including the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Thailand. Utilizing big data analytics and cloud computing technologies, SF provides its customers with integrated logistics services from transportation to warehousing management, sales forecasting and data analytics to settlement and financial management, and also extending to supply chain management. SF invests substantial resources in technology covering various fields including drones, autonomous vehicles, robotics, artificial intelligence, GIS, IoT and data analytics with a view to create a new business model combining logistics and artificial intelligence.

In a joint report, DHL, the world’s leading logistics service provider, and IBM have evaluated the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in logistics and exposed how it can be best applied to transform the industry, giving rise to a new class of intelligent logistics assets and operational paradigms. DHL and IBM outline how supply chain leaders can take advantage of AI’s key benefits and opportunities now that performance, accessibility as well as costs are more favorable than ever before.

The collaborative report identifies implications and use cases of AI for the logistics industry, finding that AI has the potential to significantly augment human capabilities. While AI is already ubiquitous in the consumer realm, as demonstrated by the rapid growth of voice assistant applications, DHL and IBM find that AI technologies are maturing at great pace, allowing for additional applications for the logistics industry. These can, for instance, help logistics providers enrich customer experiences through conversational engagement and even deliver articles before the customer has even ordered them.

“Today’s current technology, business, and societal conditions favor a paradigm shift to proactive and predictive logistics operations more than any previous time in history,” explains Matthias Heutger, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Innovation DHL. “As the technological progress in the field of AI is proceeding at great pace, we see it as our duty to explore, together with our customers and employees, how AI will shape the logistics industry’s future.”

Many industries have already successfully adopted AI into their everyday business, such as the engineering and manufacturing industry: AI is being used in production lines to help streamline production and maintenance through image recognition and conversational interfaces. In the automotive industry, AI is being extensively called upon to enhance the self-learning capabilities of autonomous vehicles. Many more examples evidence AI’s benefits with the ability to transform the world of industry after its transformational impact on the consumer world.

With the help of AI, the logistics industry will shift its operating model from reactive actions to a proactive and predictive paradigm, which will generate better insights at favourable costs in back office, operational and customer-facing activities. For instance, AI technologies can use advanced image recognition to track condition of shipments and assets, bring end-to-end autonomy to transportation, or predict fluctuations in global shipment volumes before they occur. Clearly, AI augments human capabilities but also eliminates routine work, which will shift the focus of logistics workforces to more meaningful and value-added work.

“Technology is changing the logistics industry’s traditional value chains, and ecosystems are reshaping enterprises, industries and economies,” says Keith Dierkx, IBM Global Industry Leader for Freight, Logistics, and Rail. “By leveraging AI into core processes, companies can invest more in strategic growth imperatives to modernize or eliminate legacy application systems. This can make existing assets and infrastructure more efficient, while providing the workforce with time to enhance their skills and capabilities.”

In the report, DHL and IBM conclude that AI will develop to become as omnipresent in the industrial sector as it currently is in the consumer world. AI stands to transform the logistics industry into a proactive, predictive, automated and personalized branch. Considering this, the report provides perspectives and best practices on how logistics players can seize and adopt AI in their global supply chains.

You can find the Trend Report “Artificial Intelligence in Logistics” for free download at http://www.dhl.com/ai